TORONTO – The longer immigrants reside in Canada, the greater their risk of developing cardiovascular disease — and that effect is most pronounced among people of Chinese origin, a study suggests.

Doctors have long known that the longer people stay after immigrating to western countries like Canada, the less healthy they become, said principal investigator Maria Chiu, a doctoral fellow at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.

“What we did not know was whether the degree to which this change happened was different for ethnic groups that lived in Canada.”

Using population and health data, Chiu and her co-authors looked at the prevalence of risk factors for heart disease and stroke among immigrants who had lived in Ontario for 15 years or longer, compared to those who had resided in the province for less than 15 years.

They found that longer-term residents exhibited increased risk factors for cardiovascular disease — among them Type 2 diabetes, obesity, smoking and high blood pressure — compared with more recent ethnically matched immigrants.

“And it didn’t matter whether you were white, Chinese, South Asian or black, this trend was seen across all the major ethnic groups living in Canada,” Chiu said Monday. “We also noticed that the degree to which cardiovascular health declined was different across different ethnic groups.”

Canadians of Chinese descent showed the worst decline in heart health over time, she said, followed by whites, blacks and South Asians.

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